The Moon Blooms

In St. Francisville, the Little Way Goes a Long Way

Review: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life / By Rod Dreher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here's the thing I want you to know about Rod Dreher: He evokes a loving but imperfect family in rural Louisiana, a bucolic oasis along the Mississippi River that paradoxically threatens to drown him in his youth, a life-changing experience at the Cathedral de Chartres near Paris, a brush with death on 9/11, a career climb through the corridors of big-city journalism, a spiritual search along orthodox and unorthodox paths, the small miracles of marriage, the burdens and joys of fatherhood, and the crushing saga of a sister who won't survive cancer, a sister who is the cement of this entire memoir devoted to a search for meaning in contemporary life. Dreher evokes all this wonderfully, and through the binding love of his sister for her community, through the community's reciprocal, abounding love for her -- through this crucible of community, tragedy and celebration emerges a perfect book.

Oh, Dreher might have included a bit less of himself, as some have suggested, he might have chased fewer rabbits in his spiritual hunt, he might have made his sister's illness a subtext to grander themes -- but he would have missed the magic of Ruthie Leming's little way, her pathway to a life beautifully lived. Dreher's reportorial zeal in seeking out his schoolteacher sister's character -- from family, students, colleagues and friends -- elevates the story. There's not a lazy bone in this full-bodied, flesh-and-blood examination of what makes families and communities tick.

Though the Dreher home place resides in the unincorporated community of Starhill, the cultural center of this memoir is St. Francisville, the historic river community with deep ties to the antebellum South and avian artist John J. Audubon.

It's a beautiful place of green hills and clay bluffs, one of my favorite places in the world, but it's also a place of incongruities. A generation ago, The New York Times fixed upon St. Francisville and its county-level jurisdiction, West Feliciana Parish, as a gold-digger's dream: 212 men for every 100 women, the best odds for Miss Lonely Heart in the entire nation. Then came the deflation: More than half the men were full-time residents of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the largest prison, geographically, in the U.S. It's a place that's fiercely fought commercial progress of a kind. Though West Feliciana is home to a massive prison and a nuclear power plant, many of the Starhill faithful fought off a mixed-used development recently that would have buoyed the parish's tax base with new housing and retail stores near the foot of the Western Hemisphere's longest cable-stayed bridge, the $409 million John James Audubon Bridge.

From my vantage point 30 miles south in Baton Rouge, such opposition didn't make sense. But a recent visit to St. Francisville reminded my wife and me that Ruthie's little way, writ large across the community, is a thing worth protecting from threats real and perceived. We stayed at our favorite bed & breakfast, K.W. Kennon's Shade Tree Inn, a rustic but luxurious hillside retreat in the same neighborhood where Rod Dreher now lives. At the coffee shop in the town center, we enjoyed a Bird Man Blast and later dined at the Magnolia Cafe, where Baby and the Boomers played a kaleidoscopic mix of George Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dwight Yoakum and Van Morrison hits for patrons aged eight months to 82 years.

Upon departing Sunday, we drove down Royal Street and I spied through the open doors of the venerable First United Methodist Church sanctuary a sight of standing bodies singing their final hymn. An iridescent light filled the stained glass behind the altar, where Ruthie Dreher's friends kept an all-night vigil before her 2011 funeral.

As chance would have it, we forgot our reading material at the Shade Tree Inn when we left. After picking up our cat at my mother's house in a neighboring town, we stopped back in St. Francisville. I knocked on the kitchen door of the Shade Tree Inn and K.W. Kennon was reading The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. He'd been planning to buy a copy and had become transfixed by reading ours.

"You know, Rod's a great writer," said K.W., the son of a former Louisiana governor.

Indeed, he is. If I read something grander than this book this year or next, or even in the next decade, I shall consider myself as rich as Ruthie Leming herself.

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An Inspiring Eccentricity

As Auld Lang Syne encroaches, I'm not altogether eager to jettison 2011. I write this as I'm gazing upon a 2012 calendar with the words Inspirational Life emblazoned across an aquamarine fjord, beside a bank of evergreen firs, below a craggy set of snow-dusted mountains.

It's clearly a Scandinavian scene. But the calendar fell into our laps in Mississippi. The day after Thanksgiving, as my mother-in-law conversed with fellow breakfast diners on the way out of a downtown restaurant, an octogenarian funeral director bounced out of his seat and dropped an Inspirational Life into my hands and another calendar into my wife's hands. We thanked him, but we would hardly need a calendar to remember him. There are eccentrics, there are wickedly daft eccentrics, and then there is this man.

"I've had sixteen inches of toes cut off this year," he'd proudly told us an hour earlier, promising to leave when our breakfast arrived – if we still had an appetite. He continued to sit at our table and regale us with funeral humor until our repast began. The food was not memorable, but, oh, this man was unforgettable.

He fondled a wide-brim straw hat as he talked. He spoke of his wife, 25 years his junior, spending 20 hours of her day – every day – under an oxygen tent. Wearing a silk scarf of royal blue, orange and green paisley patterns about his neck, he nodded across the restaurant to a table, almost hidden, by the kitchen door. "I sit there," he said, "so I can run back in the kitchen if I see somebody I don't like. And they'll let me eat back there."

Adroitly, he slips the vicissitudes of his funeral business into our conversation, talks about the challenges of finding good help, and relates his desire to climb a new mountain of business success in 2012. This, from a man who'll soon be 87.

He pushes back his chair and begins to leave. Then he stops in mid-stride, pulling his seat closer to the table. "Y'all got time for me to tell you something funny? Listen to this ..."

He speaks of a somber afternoon in the funeral parlor. A rotund woman sits on an antique settee, dabbing here cheeks with a handkerchief. A prim, slimmer woman sits beside her. As the funeral director walks past them, offering his solicitude, the large, grieving woman breaks out with an incongrous question.

"How old ARE you?" she asks the funeral director. He leans in, conspiratorially, and tells us at our breakfast table: This woman is every bit of 450 pounds. And so, I threw a question right back at her.

Mirth etches every line of his pink face. His mismatched blazer parts as he leans back, revealing a magenta-and-turquoise silk sash cinching his cordoroys. Mischief dances in his eyes.

"You know what I told her? I said, 'I'll tell you how old I am IF you tell me how much you weigh.' Well, that woman next to her took to laughing so hard, she fell out off the sofa and just starting rolling all over the floor. Busted out laughing all over the floor!"

The rotund woman just glared at him, he said, her weight remaining a mystery and her appearance something that, on this morning, would have sent him scampering for the kitchen. He glances over his shoulder, though, and sees nothing to fear among the diners. He laughs again, harder, and we laugh with him, wishing at some level that we had the bravado to be so plain-spoken and so utterly free-spirited.

Later, after he placed the calendars in our hands, we walked into the cold sunshine on the street and chuckled anew. This incomparable eccentric, this Liberace of the morturary business – crazy as a loon on the surface – had given us cause to reconsider this day, and the days ahead. Is it possible to be outlandish and responsible at the same time?

My wife reminded me that before her father died, he'd insisted on this very man overseeing his burial because the funeral director was as famous for his punctuality – something my father-in-law prized – as he was infamous for his sartorial style and personal candor. The funeral was pitch-perfect.

It hardly makes sense to me now, how a man could appear so flippant in public yet maintain such sought-after decorum. But I'm still laughing about that morning, still amazed by the eccentricity of it, and more certain than ever of one thing: I'll never hold a candle to this man's outlandishness. And so be it.

An Amy Rigby song comes to mind: a paean to beer-gut fishermen, aloof daughters wearing chipped fingernail polish, and unshaven husbands with mussed up hair at the breakfast table: Hey – I love you – you're perfect – don't ever change.

I find myself flipping forward into 2012, through the Inspirational Life calendar, and I land on March. There's the same brilliant Scandinavian fjord, only this time the mountains sit a bit farther back, and the view takes in a bit of the shoreline. There, a pair of pink wildflowers, towering like gladiolas to the sky, take over the scene.

To the left of the glassy lake, a verse from 2 Corinthians reminds that "God loveth a cheerful giver." I close the calendar and smile.